When Lions Attack
by Sierra Sitruc
Summary: It all started with the lion that mysteriously popped out of Lily Evans' wardrobe. LJ, mentioned RS.


**Disclaimer:** I don't own anything but the miniscule plot...and I do admit that the lion and the wardrobe came from **_The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_** though this story is nothing like that book. This is kind of in honor of it being made into a movie. But, belated, naturally.

**Author's Note**: What can I say? Too little sleep. I borrowed the idea that Head Boy and Girl get their own rooms, though in canon, I know they don't.

**Summary:** It all started with the lion that mysteriously popped out of Lily Evans' wardrobe.

**¤.¸¸.·´¨»«´¨·. ¸¸.¤**

**When Lions Attack**

_by _

_Sierra Sitruc_

James Potter, somewhat responsible Head Boy, was awoken by a high-pitched scream that sounded not unlike the girl who had his utmost affections. If it had been anyone else but her, he wouldn't have been arsed to do anything about it. Immediately, he grabbed for his trousers and stumbled out the door (no shirt to speak of) to find said girl, Lily Evans, running down the corridor from a roaring lion.

She was hardly decent for racing about in the middle of the night (not that James Potter knew the decency required to be allowed to race about during the middle of the night from a lion), only in a tank top and shorts. Her bare feet smacked on the cold stone with continued speed. James blinked. She wasn't wearing a bra.

"James!" Lily gasped, racing towards him, right past him, and into his room.

"Hey!" He shouted indignantly, before it registered in his brain that the bloodthirsty lion was headed right towards him.

He slammed his door shut and bolted it.

"Sweet Merlin, Lily! Where did that lion _come_ from?" He demanded, his messy hair even more messy than usual, making him look quite comical as he gestured about at Lily, requiring her to bite her lip hard to keep from laughing at him.

"The lion - oh you will never believe this - popped _out_ of my wardrobe!" She looked at him breathlessly. A look of realization crossing her face as she thought about how stupid she'd just sounded.

James burst out into unmanly giggles. "Your _wardrobe_. Lily, really, it's late, but I'm not recalling any cases of lions popping from wardrobes. And I read an entire book on enchanted closets, wardrobes, and trunks."

"It did, I swear it." She said seriously, "I was asleep, when I heard a noise...it sounded like scratching, I got out of bed to investigate and suddenly, this lion is leaping out of the wardrobe and roaring at me." She paused to take in James' blank expression, "Naturally, I ran."

There was an abrupt bang on the door, followed by a rough sound of claws scratching themselves down the door.

James walked up to the door and shouted through it, "My! Door! Is! NOT! A! _SCRATCHING_ POST!" The lion only growled ominously. "I know a werewolf who could take you down any full moon." He muttered, walking away from the door at last.

"Looks like we're stuck here awhile until someone else discovers the lion." Lily said, a worried look crossing her face. "I do feel terrible for whoever that is."

"Lily! Don't tell me you're giving up so fast. Students' lives are in danger and as Head Boy and Girl, it is our responsibility to see to their safety!" James peaked out his window, "We'll climb through here. We can follow the ledge all the way to the next window and warn the people of Hogwarts!" James was in hero mode now.

"That's not going to help us with the lion though, we can't possibly climb in everybody's window to warn them. Besides, not everyone has windows." The girl said, with a note of confidence in her voice.

James stopped in his tracks for a moment before leaping into action, pulling out his wand and heading for the door. "We'll just have to fight the lion ourselves then, he can't be that tough."

"James, this is a LION we're talking about, an almost unnaturally large, male LION." She spoke to him, as if he were a little boy who was trying to pick his nose, "It. Will. Eat. You." Except, boogers didn't eat you, and lions certainly could not be managed by a single finger.

"I'm sure a stunning spell or two will take care of it." James said with false assuredness.

"Oh no, oh, no, no, no, no, no, _no_! We have to have a plan, James Potter, and that means that for ONCE - just once in your life - you are going to think before you act!" Lily demanded, hands on her hips.

The Head Boy stared at her, jaw open unattractively.

"I still stay stunning is the best way."

"What if it doesn't work?" Lily prompted, stalking towards him to make sure he didn't escape through the door to sacrifice himself to the bloodthirsty lion at hand.

Cocky as ever, James replied, "Of course it will work, I can stun anything that's moving."

Lily rolled her eyes, "_Potter_," she started, and James knew she was annoyed, "This is no time for you to be snipping about like a first year with a big wand! If you just go charging after this, it could bite your head off!"

"Worried about me?" James asked, as suavely as he could manage with hair sticking up in every direction, and his trousers falling off (as he had failed earlier in his hurry, to put on a belt).

"No, I'm just thinking ahead. If the lion eats you, it could come after me next and I don't have my wand with me." Lily said, a small smirk on her face and a smug look to her posture.

James puffed out his chest, "I can handle myself." He started to unbolt the door.

"No! Don't do it!" Lily yelped, grabbing his arm.

"I can handle it." James said and with an air of confidence Lily wished he didn't always have, he threw open the door, and slammed it behind him quickly.

There was a dreadful roar, Lily's eyes went wide. There was a loud bang that vibrated through the floor. There was a - but before it could happen, Lily made up her mind.

She too, threw open the door, only to find James Potter riding atop a lion. He was gripping the mane, hanging on for dear life, glasses gone, his missing shirt giving him a wild appearance and he looked...completely attractive, she decided. But now was not the time to be thinking such thoughts, so she did what came easiest to her.

"James Potter! What happened to stunning him?" She taunted, knowing that the beast was too occupied to attack her.

"I had - another idea. We'll lock him up inside my room." He panted through his struggles to stay atop the lion, and not beneath the lion as a midnight snack. Lily was briefly reminded of her attempts as a child to sit on the lions in Trafalgar Square. Petunia had had to push her up, but this lion appeared to be slightly smaller than the ones at Trafalgar Square. Which still made it a ruddy huge monster cat.

"How are you going to get off him?"

"The same way I got on him." James said carelessly. He jumped off, grabbed Lily by the arm and drug her into his room.

The lion pursued.

They led a merry chase around his bedroom before Lily and he both made it out (alive, unharmed) and shut the door in the beast's face. They leaned against it, breathless.

Neither managed to hide the bright grins on their faces. "That was..." Lily began to say.

"BRILLIANT!" James howled, "We make an excellent team, you luring it down this way - and in there when you tricked it into running into the bedpost head first!" James shook her hand vigorously, "A job well done, Miss Evans, a job very well done."

Lily felt her cheeks turn pink, "Oh, it was nothing." She leant down to pick up his lost glasses, that were miraculously not broken, and handed them to him.

"Thanks." He said, rubbing them on his shirt before putting them back on. "Should we investigate your wardrobe...make sure no giraffes or zebras are lounging about unattended?"

"Good idea." Lily said, leading the way, James walking close beside her.

Lily's door was still open from when she had flung it open in wild abandon to escape the lion. They entered her dorm, looked around and saw nothing amiss aside from the wardrobe that was also still open.

"There has to be a reasonable explanation for a lion to come out of this - thing." James said, peering inside the wardrobe, nothing inside it looked amiss at all, just the set of doors were opened.

Then he spotted it, the lion crest on one of the handles. "Ah, look at this Lily."

The lion was shaking its mane and roaring silently, "It's never done that before."

"It must be cursed," James stated.

"But - why?"

"Well, no one knows everything about Hogwarts. I bet this wardrobe has to be at least...a few hundred years old."

"Mum would love this," Lily said thoughtfully to herself. She looked up to see James cocking a curious eyebrow at her. "Well, she likes antique furniture."

James' eyebrow didn't budge.

"You know - _antiques_?" Lily pronounced the word carefully, growing annoyed. James shook his head. With a start Lily realized that he wasn't taking the mickey out of her - he sincerely had no clue what she was talking about. "Don't tell me Wizards don't have antiques?"

"Not that I've heard of...A type of furniture you said?"

"It's not just furniture," she began to explain, "It's lots of things and people collect them, but they have to be old. Though, I'm not sure when something becomes old enough to be considered a worthy antique..."

"Has Dumbledore reached antique age yet?"

Lily giggled slightly, "Um, possibly. If he were a muggle you know, he'd be long dead by now."

"Ha! And my Great-Great Grand Dad was 30 years older than Dumbledore is now before he died."

"Yes, well, my Grandfather was 85," Lily said, rolling her eyes.

"At the prime of his life, what a shame," James said sorrowfully, "If he'd been a wizard, anyway."

Lily looked at the wardrobe again, "Do you think we should get a teacher?"

"Evans, where is your head? I'm not wearing a shirt, you're not wearing a bra -" Lily crossed her arms over her chest in horror, " - we're in your private room in the middle of the night, and a lion is probably napping on my bed as we speak. McGonagall would interpret this as yet another one of my attempts to - " Suddenly James stopped abruptly in his tirade.

"Attempts to what?" She asked, reaching for her nightgown to better cover herself.

"Err...get in your knickers?"

Lily huffed, "I thought you'd outgrown that ridiculous infatuation of yours."

"Surely, even if I had, it would've all come flooding back at the sight of you not wearing a bra - uh." He began messing with his hair, "That was the wrong thing to say wasn't it?"

"Quite."

"Damn it, Remus is always telling me to think before speaking...Check the ego at the door, he says! Hahaha?"

He decided to stare at Lily's forehead.

"Since when have you listened to kind, sensible Remus?" Her hands on her hips, James knew he'd better answer with the truth.

James did stop and think before saying what he knew would change Lily's opinion of quiet, unpretentious Remus Lupin forever, "Since Remus bedded more girls than any other bloke in our year."

"You LIE, Potter! I happen to know for a fact that Remus Lupin is about as straight as a curly cue!"

"Lily, how do you think he came about to that conclusion?"

She blinked several times, before moving to sit on the bed in shock. "I'd known he'd shagged Zoë, Janet, and Melinda, but - how many more were there before he - figured things out?"

"That is a number I think Remus would kill me if I dared share - "

"Potter," Lily warned.

"Twenty one, but that's counting the threesome he had with the Tourney twins as one shag."

"HOLY COW!" She shouted, flinging herself backwards on the bed.

James gingerly laid down beside her, "Yes, well, he has this untamable libido in his blood. He really can't help it."

Lily's arm was over her eyes as she asked, "Dare I ask how many boys he's shagged?"

The dark-haired boy grimaced, "Just one, but don't ask me how many times they've shagged because I don't keep count. In fact, Remus can't keep count either."

"What, is he seeing someone from school," she paused, something dawning on her, "Oh, my GOD! _You're_ shagging REMUS!" Lily rolled over, grabbing for her pillow and holding it over the back of her head.

"I AM NOT SHAGGING REMUS!" James shouted, outraged that she could even think such a non-heterosexual thought about him.

"Then who is, Pettigrew? Because Remus can do better." Her voice was muffled from the pillow, but James managed to catch it.

"I am under oath not to say his name, but he is the biggest egotistical git right behind me."

The pillow exploded in a flurry of dainty feathers and scarlet slivers of what was once a pillow case.

"BLACK?"

"SHHHH! It's a _SECRET_!" James hollered.

"My world has been rearranged, give me a moment." She took several deep breaths. Then she started to giggle. And giggle. She tried to muffle it with her hands, but there was no stopping it. Nor the snort that slipped out when she tried to breathe through her nose.

"Evans...did you just snort?"

"Oh," Giggle, "Yes, I did." More giggling and two more snorts.

"Now _my_ world has been rearranged," James managed to mutter right before started to laugh along goofily with Lily.

"James -" she snorted again, "You sound like a -" a strangled sound as she tried to keep speaking, "Hyena!"

"Better a hyena than a warthog!" James crowed, dodging Lily's second pillow heading towards his face.

"You'll pay for that, Potter!" Lily let out a female war cry and charged, chasing after James - forgetting she was braless.

It was like a replay of the lion chase, minus the lion. And the fact that Lily actually managed to catch James.

"Silly hyena, what am I going to do with you?" Lily asked matter-of-factly, as she held her hyena in a headlock.

"I don't know Miss Warthog, but I can really feel your breasts since I'm not wearing a shirt and - " Like a charm she let go of him, flushing bright red and crossing her arms. "That's a very thing silky nightgown you have, Miss Warthog."

James leered.

"Oh, alright, we can snog just this once, but in the morning you're going to get McGonagall to take care of the lion."

"Lion. Right. Anything you say Miss Warthog. And, might I add, the most beautiful warthog I have ever seen."

"You're not so bad yourself...for a hyena."

Fin


End file.
